During the 18th century, the Coahuilteco language was spoken by various Indigenous nations living a nomadic lifestyle in what is now southern Texas in the United States and the Mexican states of Coahuila and Nuevo León. A comprehensive linguistic corpus of the Coahuilteco language, alongside the names of its speakers¿ nations, was obtained from a set of religious documents produced around 1760 at the Franciscan missions in San Antonio, Texas. Following closely the 18 Indigenous nations mentioned in these documents, we created the digital project Indigenous Epistemes of the Borderlands at the US Center for Latino Digital Humanities at the University of Houston. The primary purpose was to develop a digital infrastructure that would facilitate the study of the ethnohistory of the Coahuiltecan nations. By actively collecting and digitizing sources related to these nations, we began building a navigable digital collection that constitutes a documentary foundation for the revitalization of their and our cultural understanding. Establishing a database that associates historical documents mentioning Indigenous nations with spatiotemporal data will enable more profound analyses of the territory as a cultural region that has shifted over time. In the ethnohistorical analysis, we sought to uphold a decolonial perspective, considering the territory as a cultural region where Indigenous nations shared knowledge and epistemes. The digital nature of the collection makes these archives accessible to audiences who previously had limited access. The collection offers an Open Access alternative that allows users to explore the archives in a tailored and structured way to gain a better understanding of the Coahuiltecan nations. Multiple digital tools were used, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, text-mining tools, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, and text-editing platforms. Our methodology identified the Alazapas and Mezcales as the two most highly mentioned Coahuiltecan nations in the Archivo General de Indias Collection, held at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. This finding, in turn, facilitated the analysis of their representation in the archive through a combination of distant and close reading. This paper presents a case study of the Alazapas, a Coahuiltecan nation that established alliances with the Spaniards for the evangelization and the governance of a village in Coahuila at the end of the 17th century. The case study contributes to Indigenous Borderlands scholarship by analyzing the agencies, strategies, and alliances of Coahuiltecan nations during the Colonial period. The application of this methodology with other non-digitized corpora contributes meaningfully to addressing the multiplicity of ethnic denominations that the literature has presented in the past as one of the preeminent research problems in the field of regional Indigenous ethnohistory.
